Happy Thanksgiving weekend to all the Americans, wherever you may be! I hope you are enjoying a very special holiday weekend with loved ones.
It’s time for the final Five Minute Friday link-up for November! I can’t believe how close we are to the end of the year.
If you’re new to the FMF community, welcome! Click here to learn more about the link-up and how it works.
This week’s FMF writing prompt is: LIKE
Setting a timer for five minutes, and . . . go.
If you’ve been around for a while, you might know that my husband and kids were all born in South Africa, and I lived in Cape Town myself for over ten years. Many of those years I was blessed to travel to the States for Thanksgiving, and on the years that I didn’t, we often managed to invite ourselves over to one American expat’s home or another to share some semblance of a traditional Thanksgiving meal.
Granted, this was entirely for my sake, as my husband did not grow up celebrating Thanksgiving at all.
Now that we’ve lived in the U.S. for almost ten years (!!!), I have finally accepted the fact that my immediate family members don’t particularly care for turkey. While that’s the most common association with many Thanksgiving meals, it’s just not a favorite over here.
So this year I decided, why bother? Why make a turkey that few of us will enjoy and fewer will eat as leftovers? So, we’re having lamb instead — a favorite amongst my husband and kids (and much more common in South Africa, I might add).
I realized I don’t have to keep with tradition just for the sake of tradition if nobody even likes it. I’m giving myself the freedom to break from the “expected” mold and please those around me instead.
(And for the record, we’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. My sister happens to be vegetarian so she doesn’t care about the turkey in any case, and my brother-in-law doesn’t know if he likes lamb or not . . . but I guess he’s about to find out!)
Wherever you are and however you celebrate, I pray you find much to be grateful for.
STOP.
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Join the link-up with your own five-minute freewrite on the prompt, LIKE, then visit your link-up neighbor to read their post and leave an encouraging comment:
Actually, I celebrate with Powerbars…
I will now rise and confess
that I don’t like green eggs and ham,
and this complaint I shall address
directly to the Great I Am,
for He’s the Founder of this feast
and should really have a care
that I don’t like it in the least,
so I’ll sit back and say, So There!
On His forelock He will tug
as He takes the plate away,
and pads softly ‘cross the rug
in His duty to obey
this diva that He went and made
to put all others in the shade.
Wonderful post! It’s turkey here, not ham (a favorite where I grew up). And sometimes rabbit, which I found out many Northcentral Ohioans love for Thanksgiving. We had to cancel plans this year, my husband and I got the flu, as well as other members of my family. But it was still a celebration of gratefulness. Blessings to you and yours!
As a man thinks, so is he. Proverbs 23:1 Our lives are powerful and effective in demonstrating the love of God and His power and his overall reality as we think God’s thoughts and rely on His guidance and strength. The measure of our effectiveness in glorifying our Lord and Savior is directly related on how much we abide in Christ, that is on the quality of our relationship with Him. So as we celebrated Thanksgiving with family and friends, did we focus on things we liked about our day, or did we think about things we did not like, or irritated or annoyed us? Let us strive to be thankful every day for all things to the Lord, for his mercy and goodness and all the blessings he has bestowed on us. Let us focus on positive thoughts, thoughts that are of good report, praiseworthy, true, just and pure. Philippians 4:6. We will be better for thinking these positive thoughts.
I don’t like turkey, so I planned on a yummy pot roast. Almost everyone else likes turkey, though! And wouldn’t you know, someone gave us a huge turkey Monday morning. So we had roast AND turkey, and my daughter did a wonderful job making a beautiful roast turkey! I’m sure it tasted just as lovely, but I enjoyed my beef instead. 😁